“A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III” is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

Coppola, son of Francis and sister of Sophia, is a sometime collaborator with Wes Anderson; the two got a well-deserved Oscar nomination for co-writing the delightful “Moonrise Kingdom.”

Maybe he should have called in Anderson. The wonderful details that went into creating the stand-alone universe that makes “Moonrise Kingdom” so enjoyable are absent here. The presence of Sheen doesn’t help much, once you get past the curiosity factor. Hmm. Womanizing party boy who keeps naked pictures of his old girlfriends in a nightstand drawer. A transformative performance this is not.

Sheen does get to play heartbreak, however, as Swan, a successful graphic designer. (The best thing the film has going for it is its hyper-stylized look, a reflection of the work Swan does for his clients.) After his girlfriend Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) leaves him, Swan falls apart. He lands in the hospital, thinking he’s had a heart attack.

As he lies in bed this gives Swan a chance to give life to his fantasies. All well and good, but do the rest of us have to sit through them? One involves a tribe of women led by Ivana dressed in Native American attire, if Native Americans wore bikinis. Another has a group of women decked out and outfitted as spies, hunting Swan down. He also rises from his coffin for a song-and-dance number in a cemetery, while his exes watch.

So, yeah. That kind of thing. When he’s not fantasizing, Swan blows deadlines for coming up with the cover for the latest album by his friend Kirby Star (Jason Schwartzman) and visits with his sister (Patricia Arquette). This is meant to be connective tissue between the fantasies, but it’s all so random it doesn’t really amount to anything.

Sheen is … well, Sheen, a version of the character we’ve seen melt down so publicly (though Swan is actually a little more grounded). It’s hard to know what’s supposed to be self-aware commentary and what’s just a scene Coppola dashed off and Sheen acted in. Are we laughing at Swan, and by extension Sheen, or with him? Not that we’re laughing much, but you get the idea.

At least Bill Murray is hanging around, however briefly, as Swan’s business manager and occasional participant in fantasies. It’s tempting to think of how a movie like this would play out if Murray were the lead, if it were his life we were watching unravel (we do see a bit of that, as he frets about his marriage), his fantasies.

But that’s not the movie Coppola made. Instead, he made this one. I’m not discounting the possibility that there is some cosmic joke going on that I am not hip enough to get. It’s just that, when it comes to “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” I don’t really want to.

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